GIF animations to document blogs

I think GIFs are interesting and are fun to experiment with. I definitely consider myself a beginner at GIFs lol  I also have a difficult time creating gif with a small filesize from video.

A cause and effect GIF like the following I think adds great value:

And its only 85 kB

Here is a GIF with good intentions, but is difficult to understand on its own.

It was intended to show the circuit sleeping at 700 nA, but it is difficult to make that out just looking at the GIF on its own.

Freehand video turned into a GIF doesn't look that great either.

One of the previous Community Managers once mentioned something that has stuck with me.. he once stated that when writing a blog, there's no need to write what is in a photo, because people can see for themselves what is in the photo. I thought that was pretty useful insight, because then it made me think what is in a photo? The way I interpreted it, is that if I'm writing a blog, then my photo(s) should be able to describe themselves, i.e. make the photo clear, or at least have arrows or annotation to place focus in the right place, and then the text doesn't need to describe the photo. Not saying I always manage to observe this, but it has helped as a guideline for me.  The 700nA GIF would not be clear so would need text to explain, by which point perhaps the GIF may be of very limited use.

One of the previous Community Managers once mentioned something that has stuck with me.. he once stated that when writing a blog, there's no need to write what is in a photo, because people can see for themselves what is in the photo. I thought that was pretty useful insight, because then it made me think what is in a photo? The way I interpreted it, is that if I'm writing a blog, then my photo(s) should be able to describe themselves, i.e. make the photo clear, or at least have arrows or annotation to place focus in the right place, and then the text doesn't need to describe the photo. Not saying I always manage to observe this, but it has helped as a guideline for me.  The 700nA GIF would not be clear so would need text to explain, by which point perhaps the GIF may be of very limited use.

I think that is really great advise. Often when browsing sites I will skim through a potential page only looking at the images/figures to decided if I want to read it. As you suggest making images/figures clear can go along ways.

shabaz said:

e once stated that when writing a blog, there's no need to write what is in a photo, because people can see for themselves what is in the photo

It feels like we've come full circle, because while that's good advice from a narrative perspective, it's bad advice from an accessibility screen reader perspective for someone that needs to have web pages and blogs read out to them. Though this (should) be a reason why we have (descriptive) 'alt' text tags on images so that the screen readers can interpret what they see and describe them (as they would be seen by someone that can visualise the image/animation).